carne, carnales, and the carnivalesque: Bakhtinian batos, disorder, and narrative discourses

This paper critically juxtaposes the subjugating, dominant discourses of elite Mexican thinkers like Octavio Paz concerning Mexican male, working-class, speech/body play with such performances as experienced in Mexican-American south Texas. The latter are interpreted as a counterhegemonic universe of discourses against these authoritative elite narratives. Nonetheless the paper is reflexively conscious of its own interpretive stance in this relationship. [poetics, politics, ethnography, Mexican-American]